The World Food Day was observed on the 16^th of October. In that regard, the Charitable Foundation ‘Casa Providentei’ emphasised once more the importance of assurance of each person’s right to food, making an appeal and a challenge to everybody to do good and to share the joy with those people, who need help. Thus, there were gathered foodstuffs that were later donated to elderly people on Friday, the 16^th of October. It was a beautiful coincidence that those old people, who visited the daily care centre for the elderly, prepared a performance with poems and songs, named ‘Indian Summer in Older People’s Houses’. The older people lost the track of time, age and loneliness in a warm atmosphere veiled with the smells of quinces, apples and nuts. The greater was their astonishment and surprise when each of them received a food parcel. ‘I will be eating for a week from here!’, ‘Wow, I have been longing for eating a bar of chocolate for a long time!’, ‘Is this all for me?’ – these are only some utterances they gave while discovering the contents of the parcels.

We thank everybody, who received our appeal with open heart, thus contributing to augmentation of joy on the faces of those people, who are sadder and lonelier than us.

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The right to food is a component of the human rights contained in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also included in the 1978 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Pursuant to GC-12 (General Comment #12) of the CESCR (UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), the right to food is defined as the right when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has the physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement, under conditions of human dignity. The human right to food is a duty of the state that shall observe, protect and fulfil this standard through the laws and programmes it implements.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations declared in 1979 the 16^th of October to be the World Day of Fighting Hunger and Poverty.

Rodica Negura